Harmy

Here's a little something I wrote ;-) I know it seems like it doesn't belong here but read on and you'll see it does.

 

Ars Galactica, 3/3/2018

 

When Leonardo Da Vinci was brought back to life by genetic engineers last year, he adapted  very quickly, as could be expected from the visionary genius that he is. He immediately took interest in modern art forms and became especially enthusiastic about digital painting.

 

When he found out that many of the works of art that influenced him in his youth were in the hands of private collectors or locked up in museum vaults and only available to public in digitalized and often altered form, he started an active campaign for these to be publicly exhibited and today he had a speech in the American congress.

 

 

 

 

American Art Review, 2/2/2027

 

Five years ago, the state of Da Vinci’s most celebrated work the Mona Lisa reached a point where it was no longer safe to exhibit. It was taken away from the Louvre gallery and replaced by a copy. This week though, the original was exhibited again, after being subjected to a thorough restoration supervised by maestro Da Vinci himself. Due to his fascination with the modern digital painting techniques, portions of the painting were carefully cut out of the famous work and replaced by newly printed elements, digitally painted by Da Vinci. While many art historians cry out in terror, Da Vinci maintains that it is his work and he can do what he likes with it. He further said: “I was never quite satisfied with the way Mona Lisa, or Merry as I called it at the time, turned out. I always felt it to be unfinished and it was only the modern technology that allowed me to finish it the way I wanted it to be and was never before able to achieve by the primitive brush techniques of the 16^th century.”

 

The restored painting was exhibited for a limited time in the Louvre and attracted tens of thousands of people, who were eager to see the maestro’s newly enhanced classic. After the initial exhibition time is over, the original will be replaced by a copy of the restored work.

 

While many of Da Vinci’s admirers appreciate his new additions to his classic work, there are many art lovers and historians who disagree. Art historian Peter Glans wrote: “It isn’t only that it is wrong in my opinion to alter a classic work of art in any way, it is also the way in which Mona Lisa was altered; that is by using a technique completely different to the one originally used, which renders the new replacements quite obvious and distracting. We can only hope that it is still possible to restore the painting to it’s original glory.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aesthetica Nova, 5/19/2029

Today marks a very important time in the history of art. After a long period of waiting, maestro Leonardo Da Vinci finally opened the first exhibition of art work he made since he was brought back to life twelve years ago.

 

While thousands of people stand in line to see these new works, many critics express their disappointment. The maestro’s newly found fondness of digital painting and naïve art are not to everyone’s taste but the works are also criticized for being uninventive and derivative.

 

Nevertheless the exhibition is one of the most commercially successful ones in history.

 

 

 

 

Artnet, 5/16/2032

After three long years Leonardo Da Vinci finally opened his second exhibition after his 2017 resurrection. At the reception, he presented a series of new works, which are all completely digital this time and even shown exclusively in digital frames.

 

The quality of the works, which this time exhibit a vague inspiration in cubism and surrealism  alongside the naïve art of the previously exhibited works, is once again debatable at best and many art critics who were hoping for Leonardo’s old genius to return this time don’t hesitate to express their disappointment and says that this exhibition is even worse then the last one.

 

 

 

 

Atopia, 9/12/2034

 

 

Da Vinci, who had the Mona Lisa removed from the Louvre with the intention of exhibiting it together with his new works at a third new exhibition planed for next year, finally gave in to the overwhelming demand for re-exhibition of Mona Lisa in Louvre. But yet again, he did so in his own way, which disappointed many. The original painting, which was altered in 2027, was scanned at a high resolution and this scan was once again digitally cleaned up to get rid of any remaining cracks in the original paintwork and this digital scan is now exhibited in a high definition digital frame.

 

“The work now looks better than ever before and in the HD digital frame, the audiences can see more detail than on the painting itself,” Leonardo’s spokesperson Kosh Jurnish explained.

 

But what is worse, further alterations were made to the picture, which now features elements of naïve art and cubism in order to better fit into the grand exhibition Leonardo has planned for next year. Also, the over-all colouring of the Mona Lisa was heavily altered for it’s 2024 exhibition.

 

“This is how I always intended the picture to look,” Da Vinci commented on the colour issue.

When asked about restoring the original painting to it’s unaltered form, Da Vinci said: “That version doesn’t exist anymore. It’s in old art history books if anyone wants it. To me it is just a rough draft.”

 

 

 

 

Artisctica, 5/19/2035

 

The grand exhibition was another disappointment. Although Da Vinci gave up on naïve art and stuck mostly to cubism and surrealism this time, the works still lacked inventiveness and were derivative just like their predecessors.

 

 

 

 

Art Weekly 2/15/2036

 

An announcement was made today that after numerous complaints of art enthusiasts and even petitions against the suppression of the original Mona Lisa, it will finally be exhibited in Louvre this December. The artistic world rejoices.

 

 

 

 

Modern Art 9/21/2036

 

It was revealed today that the original Mona Lisa will be exhibited alongside its new digital apparition for double the entrance fee. It will only be a printed reproduction sourced from the scan made for the 2013 edition of History of Art, which was one of the last printed art-books and can only be found in specialized libraries.

“It was the best source we could find,” Leonardo’s spokesperson Kosh Jurnish told us. “The original painting was irreversibly altered. But I saw it myself and it looks great, just like the real thing.”

 

But others disagree. “I saw the ‘original’ Mona Lisa today in Louvre and I can tell you one thing – it’s not the original. I saw the original when it was last exhibited and the detail on this scan is nowhere near the real painting and even the color reproduction is not perfect. Also,  the authors of the 2013 History of Art edition used amateur digital restoration techniques, which further distorted the fine detail of the scan,” says Harry Richards – art historian and restorer. And he adds: “I know for a fact that the original pieces that were cut out of the painting and replaced by digital prints in 2017 are still preserved in a vault somewhere and I even offered maestro Da Vinci to restore it for free but I never got any response.”

As to making a 100% theatrical HD version, I'm definitely not going to attempt that, because there are so many changes that with the GOUT as a source, it would be next to impossible, but I'm definitely going to make the new versions more despecialized than the old ones. I'd say, they should be like 85-90% the theatrical version.

Also, as I don't own a BD burner, my edits will definitely be just AVCHD. I want to make 720p DVD9 AVCHDs now using the HDTV broadcasts and then, when the blus come out, I might do a 1080p AVCHD version with each film split over two DVD9s.

There are some PCM and DTS isolated music tracks in Wookiegroomer's BD releases, but they are of course the SE.

Wow, I was wondering whether there were any women here. There were a few people I thought were women, but they turned out to be guys (I'm not gonna say who ;-D )...

All three, I want to hopefully encode at better quality and remove more SE changes in all of them. Namely all  the CGI animals (with two possible exceptions) in STAR WARS. In ESB it would only be a few minor things but I want to redo that mainly because of the encode quality because this time I wouldn't be using Ady's AVCHD but his 14GB MKV as a source and maybe adding a bit of my own colour correction. I definitely want to give Mr. Shaw his eyebrows back in ROTJ and try and restore the original ending better. I also want to get rid of some jarring cuts like the Bantha herd in ROTJ. And I will hopefully be able to use some higher quality soundmixes as well.

But it will be quite some time before those will be finished.

Or add some stylish starwarsy bars, instead of the black bars. The question is, as these are static menus, do you need to scale as video or just as picture?

PM sent :-) You should just know, that the latest youtube clips are just experiments for the next version and are not part of the currently available versions. See the first post to get more info about the currently available versions.

Yeah, sure, that's what I meant, that it's better to use this kind of spell check than the automated one.

TV's Frink said:

 

1e) Most (all?) browsers support a spell-check feature.  Use it, especially if it can be automated.

Well, actually, in my experience, an automated spell check can do more damage than good, sometimes you willingly use a word that the spell check doesn't recognise and it changes it into some nonsense. Words like "rotoscoping" can be automatically changed to something like "hygroscopic"  ;-)

OK, to give credit, where credit is due, I have to say that some of it is partially Adywan's work. Let's break it down, shall we?

For this shot I had to remake the wipe and in order to make it fit better with the HD footage and get rid of the horrible DVNR ghosting in GOUT, I used photoshop to recreate the original background as a still picture using the GOUT and the parts from the SE that were the same as the original and then rotoscoping in the speeder and it's shadow in from GOUT.

This shot is the only one for which I had to use just upscaled GOUT, because it was altered beyond recognition in the SE.

This shot was masterfully recreated by Adywan for his ANH: Revisited, but sadly only in SD, so I only used the part where the Ronto walks in front of the camera from Revisited and used this guy in the grey cape as a transition between the SD and HD footage. In this still picture you can see there is a slight difference in the colours but in movement it all happens so quickly that it is pretty seamless.

This shot was the toughest one. I originally thought that I would just use Revisited for it but Ady seems to have used the background from GOUT and rotoscope the stormy in from the SE, but the GOUT shot is pretty bad and he probably had to match the grain on the stormtrooper and also, and that I don't understand, it is cropped even more than the GOUT shot is, so it doesn't look so great in ANH:R and especially when put together with HD footage. First I tried rotoscoping the flying droid out using GOUT but the quality difference was just too noticeable, so I ended up using photoshop to recreate an empty HD background plate which goes to the very edge of the camera movement on both sides and then animating its movement in AE to follow the camera movement in the shot and rotoscoping the stormtrooper into it in detail. When this was done, I exported the whole shot as a sequence of BMP pictures and fixed the little details in Photoshop. It's still not perfect but I think it looks pretty good, especially when put back into the film.

Once again this shot was already done by Adywan in SD but because it was the same transfer, it was quite easy (as in: it only took about two hours) for me  to rotoscope the ANH:R footage into the HD transfer.

This shot was done by rotoscoping the SE HD footage and GOUT together. I used three different masks: one for the Ronto, one for the shadow under the speeder and one for the R2 droid when the speeder passes it. It was really dificult to match the colours of the two different sources and although I used a few different filters on the GOUT, the transition is still quite noticeable. But I think that overall the shot looks better than in the GOUT.

I rotoscoped the Ronto out of this shot using the GOUT. It was quite an undertaking to rotoscope around the foreground characters but as the quality of this shot isn't so bad in the GOUT, the result is IMO quite satisfactory.

The source of the mix used in the NTSC DVD is Belbucus' PCM LD capture, which was the source of h_h's mixes, so it should sync exactly the same as this mix does.

No, I just cut video in PD, for the ro(n)toscoping I use After Effects.

Oh, that's quite alright, now that the project is done (except for the PAL DVD9, which I hope to release this week btw.) this thread is pretty much dead anyway (although I would appreciate some more feedback).

And here's the complete Mos Eisley video with a few newly despecialized shots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agv_jHkkzho&feature=feedu

Thanks :-)

Here's another one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXfz3hInhBo

Gaffer Tape said:

...it does seem rather shady to not even redo the menus or anything, but rather let you click the link only for it to say, "You want that feature?  You no can have that feature!"

They obviously do that on purpose as a form of advertisement: Do you want to watch this? Buy the DVD!!!

And I agree that removing close captions is shameful.

It has always been like that here in the Czech Republic, most releases had a retail version and a rental version. And even on VHS, when there was the trilogy set, there was a rental version and you could only rent each film separately. I fully expect these Blu-Rays to be the same for rental- each film separately and without the bonus discs.

PM sent

PM sent.

Those changes are not restorations, that music was never there, it was just written and recorded for those scenes but never put in the films for any version of all the official sound-mixes.

It's interesting, how most of the time you can tell if someone's bad spelling or grammar are caused by him being a non-native speaker or whether it is because he just can't spell or doesn't care. And also, my own spelling abilities aren't so great either, but that's why I use spell-check, (Firefox and Chrome both have it and I'm sure most of the other browsers do too) sure, it won't show stuff like Lucas is a lair (still funny) but it will fix stuff like double letters (one of my biggest problems - speak of the devil, I just typed bigest :-) ) and stuff like that.

I used Ady's mix for my TESB PDE (which should be the same sync as GOUT) and I felt it was in sync but fishosaurus says that he thinks that while it syncs in the beginning, there is a 175 ms delay by the end. Now, this could also be an issue with my PDE video, so it may sync just fine with the GOUT but it's certainly worth paying attention to.

Absolutely! In the mkv you can actually see the grain. ESB:R is gonna look so awesome :-)

OK, version 2, slightly better, I think :-)

I'd upload the sound for you but there was an audio fix released and I only have the unfixed version. But because the audio fix was released, you might be able to download the audio separately somewhere.

Oh, and here's what h_h said about Ady's mix:

I've only listened on my headphones so far, not the full 5.1, but mostly the sound seemed pretty good.  The majority of it is the '97 SE mix, so there are various dialogue differences from the familiar 35mm version (how many of them appeared in the 70mm is anyone's guess).  Some parts of the movie use the 1993 mix, but this was not always done consistently: most--but not all--of the music edits, and a few of the lines, in addition to the obvious places where the edit differs from the SE.  Occasionally the transitions between the sources weren't always seamless and had audible jump cuts, though admittedly this was rare.

What I can't figure out is why adywan decided to use the surround channels from the 2004 mix combined with the front channels from the 1997 version.  I won't fully know what that sounds like until I've had a chance to play it in 5.1, but while usually they are similar, occasionally this results in a bizarre effect when they don't match up.  Most clearly this can be found when Luke observes the probe droid meteor landing on Hoth: the dvd version added a rolling echo that moves from front to back to bolster the impact, but in this mix only the rear half of the sound is heard (in all pre-2004 versions, this was not there at all).

Most of these things come down to individual preference and nitpicking, though.  He has done an incredible job with this, and I'm very grateful to him for making this version.  Here's hoping to see a theatrical version of Star Wars from him sometime in the future.  ;)